Jesus is a horny drunk? Welcome back, James Frey

Tim Elliott

Meet Jesus Christ. Not the Sunday school Jesus Christ or the guy you saw in King of Kings, with the high cheekbones and cool beard.

No, meet author James Frey's Jesus Christ, a horny drunk who gets about in piss-stained pants, a dumpster-diving free love enthusiast who sleeps on benches and has gay sex with Born Again preachers and who, when he isn't turning water into wine or healing paraplegics, plays video games in his rent-assisted Bronx apartment.

He's not the Messiah ... Frey relishes the prospect of riling the Christin right with his moden-day Jesus. Photo: Getty Images

Yes, James Frey, the bad boy of American letters, is back, this time with a book that his publishers promise - and no doubt desperately hope - will be his most controversial yet.

Set in contemporary New York, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible tells the tale of a young and at first unprepossessing Jewish man called Ben Zion Avrohom, "also known as Ben Jones", as Frey writes, "also known as the Prophet, also known as the Son, also known as the Messiah, also known as the Lord God".

We meet Ben, with his jet black eyes and pearlescent white skin, only second-hand, through the testimony of his modern day disciples, people he meets and whose lives he changes, including his family rabbi, a crack addict neighbour, his arresting policeman and a surgeon who patches him up after he suffers a horrific and apparently unsurvivable workplace accident.

Throughout it all, Ben emerges as an unorthodox Messiah, a grungy savant with a penchant for Delphic one-liners ("One must know oneself to love, not know others"), a neo-hippie who rails against faith and the idea of life after death ("there will be no redemption and no forgiveness") and whose central message is to stop praying and start living. "Love and laughter and f---ing make one's life better," he tells a priest. "Worship is just the passing of time."

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"My idea was to write a theoretical third book of the bible," Frey explains, speaking on the phone from his New York city apartment.

"To explore what it would be like if the Messiah were really here, walking around the city, how would that person live, what would he be like, how would we would react to him? It was the biggest and best idea I had."

Revisionist accounts of Jesus's life have been written by Jim Crace, Norman Mailer and Philip Pullman, among others. But, notwithstanding the writing, which is in parts very powerful, everything about Frey's book, including the US release date (Good Friday), seems calculated to maximally infuriate the Christian right. "I don't think they're gonna love it," he says, with more than a hint of relish.

Yet the only controversy so far seems to be from other writers, who have criticised Frey for goading a religion that, by and large, doesn't chop your head off for making fun of it. If he is such a rebel, they say, why didn't he have a shot at Islam?

"Because I don't live in an Islamic country," Frey counters. "I live in a Christian country and a Christian culture, arguably the most Christian one on the planet."

Besides, the book was never written to shock. "It was a genuine attempt to tell the story of the Messiah today, and it's entirely grounded in research. I read up on the Messiah and Messiah theory, and the way the Messiah is viewed, primarily in Christianity and Judaism. There were also consultants who worked on it with me, very religious people, Catholic priests, evangelical pastors, a rabbi."

These "consultants" ultimately became some of Final Testament's many disciples, whose testimony Frey conjures like a master ventriloquist. Despite all the scandals and the posturing, the 41-year-old Frey remains an impressive writer, all the more so for his apparent allergy to irony. Any potential sniggers or lingering reader doubts are incinerated, like tissues in a furnace, by the heat of his storytelling, which burns with the same reckless energy that characterised his first book, A Million Little Pieces.

And yet the scandal of that book seems impossible to escape. Published in 2003, A Million Little Pieces purported to be a nonfiction memoir of Frey's years as an alcoholic, drug addict and criminal. Writing with a true outlaw's disregard for conventional grammar, Frey painted himself as a turbocharged badass who had been assaulted by cops and done jail time, a human tornado whose idea of fun was beating up priests and having chicks snort coke off his penis. Frey writes of his time in rehab and of undergoing root canal surgery without painkillers (he copes by squeezing tennis balls until his nails crack).

The book became a bestseller - it's now sold 5 million copies - aided by Oprah Winfrey, who in October 2005 selected it for her book club. But then, in January 2006, investigative website the Smoking Gun published a 13,000-word expose on the book's many and varied fabrications, from the trivial (Frey had never set a county record for blood-alcohol level) to the serious, such as the role he invented for himself in an actual train accident that killed two high-school girls.

Readers reacted badly: some told Frey they hoped he'd get hit by a bus or get "ass cancer". Oprah invited him onto her show to explain himself, then roasted him alive. Random House dumped him, setting aside $2.35 million to settle the claims of aggrieved readers. Soon the only truths that remained intact were that of the author's privileged upbringing in Cleveland and suburban Michigan - his father was a senior executive for Whirlpool - and his time in rehab.

But for Frey, the truth - old fashioned, objective truth, in any case - has always remained subordinate to artistic truth. "My goal is and always was to create literature," he says. "In Million Little Pieces, I embellished, I changed, I altered, I lied, I did all of that, but I did it with the goal of making the book as good as I could."

Talking of his subsequent work, which included the follow up "memoir" My Friend Leonard (2004), and a novel about Los Angeles, Bright Shiny Morning (2008), Frey says he didn't ask himself if he was writing "fact, fiction or memoir, because I think the distinctions are idiotic. When you see a painting in a museum, do you need to know if it's a fiction or nonfiction painting?"

The scandal left him disillusioned with mainstream publishing, which he calls "old, staid, conservative and pretty boring", and contemptuous of journalists. (As Alexis, the trauma surgeon in The Final Testament says: "I don't look for truth in the media.") Abandoned by some of his old friends, Frey found new ones, including controversial artist Richard Prince and the then ailing Norman Mailer, both transgressive icons, combative rebels who shared much of the author's world view.

In 2009 Frey launched Full Fathom Five, a young adult novel publishing company aimed at producing high concept, commercial books along the lines of the Twilight series. "I come up with the ideas and I have a team of 45 writers who write the initial drafts," Frey says. "It functions exactly like an artists' studio, like Andy Warhol's factory did, or like Jeff Koons's arts making operation or Damien Hirst's operation.

''It seems such an obvious idea to me, I don't know why it doesn't happen more often. "

Last year, however, evidence of the company's highly restrictive contracts - writers receive $250 for a finished manuscript, for example, but are financially responsible for any legal action - lead to accusations that Frey was running a kind of "fiction factory" or literary sweat shop.

"We have people sign real business contracts but I doubt it's any harsher than the contract you have with your employer. The writers who work for us have earned an average of $225,000 each on the projects that we have sold. If that's a Dickensian contract, then sign me up."

Frey suspects that the thing that most offends people is the idea of books being mass produced. Not that he really cares.

"I think a lot of people are uncomfortable with what I do,'' he says, ''but that doesn't mean I do it to shock them … It's just that I don't want my work to be boring or like what other people do. Living in the middle is not place I want to be."

The Final Testament of the Holy Bible by James Frey is published by John Murray, $32.99.